EarthScope is the #1 Most Epic Project on Popular Science Website!

(from the PopSci web site)

It is very cool that EarthScope has been selected as the #1 most epic science project at Popular Science Magazine/Website. They have an article in the August 2011 issue entitled:  Big Science: The Universe's Ten Most Epic Projects.  It is impressive to have that rating against some other big and exciting science projects, including the Large Hadron Collider and the International Space Station. They used some quantitative ratings and also some qualitative ones such as: What's in it for me? Wow factor, and Scientific Utility on all of which it received a 10. I think that the sense of EarthScope's practicality and its cost to size (variably measured) ratio help boost it. The write up is nice and generally gets the high points given its brevity.

This kind of coverage is really helpful for a program such as EarthScope in terms of visibility. It is the only earth science activity on the list (there is Neptune--ocean science observatory). We can put a lot of energy into outreach, but the readership of something like PopSci will simply dwarf anything we might do...

Since May, we (Matt Fouch, Ed Garnero, Steve Semken, Wendy Taylor, and I) have been leading the EarthScope National Office and I have been the Chair of the EarthScope Steering Committee, so this is very good news and due to the efforts of the prior ESNO staff at Oregon State University.

Subsidence in Arizona measured with InSAR by Arizona Department of Water Resources

An email from the Arizona Department of Water Resources came by today announcing updates to their Land Subsidence Maps.

While the active tectonics of Arizona are rather limited, we do see distributed deformation of a few mm/year across the state with our most active faults in the western Grand Canyon. Jeff Lockridge has been working with me and Matt Fouch and our seismology colleagues in Arizona on an updated seismicity catalog (have a look here: Arizona State University Earthquake Information).

What I often point to as rather interesting ground deformation is that due to groundwater withdrawal and the associated subsidence. With Professor Jim Tyburczy and several former students (Maurice Tatlow, Paul Ivanich, Ken Fergason, and Amanda Perkins), we have dabbled a bit in this topic over the last 10 years. This link includes some of the results from our work.

Scottsdale subsidence feature with 3.2 years (11/15/2007 To 01/08/2011) of subsidence. The maximum is 4 cm. Paul Ivanich worked on the southeastern portion along the CAP canal for his M.S.

West Valley subsidence feature with 6.5 years (03/08/2004 To 09/13/2010) of subsidence. The maximum is 10 cm. Amanda Perkins worked in this area for her M.S.

AGU Session: High-Resolution Topographic Data Processing, Analysis and Visualization: Emerging Techniques and Applications

Please consider submitting an abstract to the following 2011 American Geophysical Union Meeting session this fall.  The deadline for abstract submissions is August 4th.

EP13: High-Resolution Topographic Data Processing, Analysis, and Visualization: Emerging Techniques and Applications
(http://sites.agu.org/fallmeeting/scientific-program/session-search/283)

High-resolution topographic data collected via airborne and terrestrial laser scanning (lidar) have stimulated new results in the areas of surface processes, hazards, tectonics, and ecology. However, significant bottlenecks to data access, processing, and analysis remain. This session emphasizes technical advancements in high-resolution topographic (and bathymetric) data management, processing, analysis, and visualization, as well as related applications. We invite contributions on software and algorithm development, high-performance data processing and visualization, and emerging analysis techniques.

Sponsor: Earth and Planetary Surface Processes (EP)
Co-Sponsor(s): Geodesy (G), Hydrology (H), Earth and Space Science Informatics (IN)

Conveners:
Christopher Crosby
San Diego Supercomputer Center, UC San Diego

J Ramon Arrowsmith
Arizona State University

Michael Oskin
UC Davis

Remembering Kurt Frankel: post at OpenTopography

Many of us heard the sad news of the tragic passing of Kurt Frankel this weekend.

Chris Crosby and I put together a memory of him at OpenTopography: blog post.

Old blog entries worth keeping

I rescued a few entries from my old blog that seem to be worth keeping (at least I look for them occasionally). The old site is so bad that I just printed them to PDF, so the quality is not really there, but at least there is a record.

Musings, personal items, and miscellaneous

• Memory of Charles Lockwood
• Balloon aerial photography update
• Pilgrimage to see Cleve Moler, inventor of MATLAB

Students and teaching

• Why going to seminars and talks is a good idea
• Pondering quantitative skills for geoscience students
• 2007 statement on research and teaching in active tectonics and quantitative structural geology and geomorphology

Earthquakes

• How do we determine that the Chile earthquake was 500 times larger thatn the Haiti earthquake?
• Ramon Arrowsmith and Mike Treder on Science Saturday Earthquake Edition of BloggingheadsTV

San Andreas fault

• Century long average time intervals between earthquake ruptures of the San Andreas fault in the Carrizo Plain California
• New videos on the San Andreas Fault

High resolution topography

• Geomorphic response to uplift along the Dragon's Back pressure ridge, Carrizo Plain California
• Current capabilities and cummunity needs for software tools and educational resources for use with LiDAR high resolution topography data
• Differencing sequential LiDAR scans to look for GPS error and target movement
• Final workshop report on Studying Earth Surface Processes with High Resolution Topographic Data

Other topography

• Looking at the new ASTER 30 m DEMs–not so impressive relative to SRTM 90 m
• Google elevation service released

Grand Canyon

• Exploration of the Colorado River and Grand Canyon August 17-23, 2008
• Havasu Creek near the Colorado River 2008 flood aftermath pictures
• River rapid hydraulics in the Grand Canyon

Starting a new blog; moving from the old one

Hello world!

I don't want to sound too presumptuous with the name Active Tectonics, but that is the sub discipline of earth science that interests me (study of deformation of interest to society). It is also the name of my research group at Arizona State University (ASU): activetectonics.asu.edu. Furthermore, my old blog was rather unimaginatively named arrowsmith blog. And, as you would see if you clicked on that link, the web site is very slow, has security problems with most browsers, and is no longer supported by ASU.

I am not a big blogger, but I like to put ideas, opportunities, other tidbits out there that might be of interest. I started my last blog August 15, 2007 and had about 60-70 posts.

To write a blog requires of course that one has something interesting to say. I hope that will be the case here. I invite comments on the posts. May they promote clarification and collaboration.

Here are number of links to my local piece of cyberspace:

• J Ramón Arrowsmith home page at ASU
• Active Tectonics Research Group at ASU
• Earth Surface Processes Groups of the Schools of Earth and Space Exploration, Sustainable Engineering and the Built Environment, and Geography at ASU
• School of Earth and Space Exploration at ASU


• OpenTopography (I am coPI and chief evangelist for this high resolution topography project)
• EarthScope (I just became director of the EarthScope National Office at ASU and the chairman of the EarthScope Steering Committee. I expect we will have a blog over there as well.).